Monday, January 31, 2011

It's Colder than A (Fill in the Blank)

Despite the cold winter, William can often be observed in shorts and a t-shirt, (The fact that the shirt is orange and the shorts bright red is fodder for another blog.)  He is a heater box, his hands noticeably warmer than Anna's or my hands, which are generally ice cold.  He enjoys the cold and grumbles when I make him wear a coat because I'm cold.  


Because of this discrepancy in our perception of cold, an article on Slate.com caught my eye:  Are Women Really More Likely to Feel Cold Than Men?  Could this explain why he seems impervious to it?  


As I read the article, I was alternately amused and disgruntled.  Oh, so women have warmer hearts but colder hands.  Aw, how nice!  But it is because of body fat.  Okay, so now we're fat and that's why we are cold.  I thought insulation.....


But then I had to discount the study altogether.  First because their solution is implausible:  "according to some of the same researchers, both men and women may increase their endurance by taking cold showers or running around half-naked in the snow, in case that sounds appealing".  NOT going to happen.  Hold on a minute while I turn up my space heater...There.


How do you think they measured this data?  "They immersed 11 women up to their necks in chilly water, monitored their rectal temperatures, and compared the results to previous work with 14 men".  EITHER they paid each victim participant an exorbitant amount of money (and I'm talking millions) OR they were recruiting mentally ill people who would submit to such torture, which discounts the results.  I mean, really, who would....well, I don't even want that mental picture.


Smaller people have more skin-to-core ratio, so perhaps that explains some of my chilliness.  Perhaps it is just that it is 25 bloomin' degrees outside.  I keep waiting for those hot flashes to hit me, looking forward to them in fact, but I don't think they run in my family.  In the mean time, you won't find me streaking outside.  Oh, we don't want that mental image, either.  


Notes:
Coincidences:  Finished reading Fall of Giants, which went into way more information than I wanted about World War I.  I did learn a few things, assuming he researched well, but by the end of 800 arduous pages, I was done with WWI.  I began reading The Winter Rose and it is set in?  WWI.  Watching Masterpiece Classic: Downton Abbey and it ends the season with?  WWI.  The universe is coalescing to teach me about WWI (which my grandpa Carl was in, by the way, a German immigrant, fighting his own country).

2 comments:

Fatcat said...

I'm freezing too, but I'm big and my daughter is always complaining that the heat is turned up too high and she's tiny ....

It's a mystery.

pita-woman said...

Well, in my family, it's the women who are hot and the men cold. My mom and I both roast, while my husband and father freeze. Oh, my boss freezes too, he's forever griping when I have the window open, regardless of the temperature.
So sounds to me like that study was a bit flawed.

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